Would the 10/11/2022 Order to Dismiss be a part of the diversion program?
No, I don’t think we can say with confidence that the only facts presented to the grand jury were the facts given in the Reason article. Maybe that’s the whole story, but maybe there’s a lot more.
An order to dismiss would also be the likely result of a pretrial diversion program: you behave yourself for X amount of time, do community service and/or whatever other programs the district attorney recommends (which might include for example alcohol/substance abuse treatment, counseling, or payment of restitution), and the DA dismisses the case. In the jurisdiction with which I’m familiar (which is however not McLennan County, Texas), an applicant for diversion is required to stipulate to the facts of the case, which might be construed as a guilty plea. She’s not been convicted of anything, but the arrest will be on her record until expunged, and many employment applications ask “have you ever been arrested?” rather than “have you ever been convicted?”
I just mapped my elementary school urban walk: .5 miles exactly.
To my second elementary school: more than a mile.
To middle school if I missed the bus: 1.4 mile.
To high school " ": 2.5 miles.
I continued poking around but didn’t find anything interesting. As the article says, she’s a teacher. She’s fairly religious. She does sleep consulting for new moms. According to her, part of her community service was that she was asked to help the child protective services to write the course work for teaching parents how to be better parents.
In general, from the outside, she looks clean.
The article links to a legal firm, Gonzales Law Group, which has some articles up about “child endangerment”. Consistently, those articles mention activities like leaving children in the presence of people taking meth.
If you search for just “Wallace” in the court records, there are several people listed in recent years - including for possession of meth. But, note, that’s for the entire county of McLennan - which has a quarter of a million people in it.
I haven’t been able to link any of those named to her. She used Player Bail Bonds to get out of jail. None of the other Wallaces did, according to the court record.
We know that there’s a husband and two older brothers, so that’s three people other than her who would be in the house and, potentially, up to no good. But, likewise, we have no reason to think anything bad of them at the moment.
We don’t know what the police saw when she opened the front door, when they knocked.
We do know that the lawyer told her that it was better to avoid trial, and she believed him.
In general, the only reasons that I can think of for the police, child services, and the DA to go after her are either because:
- All of them are insane.
- There’s something more going on in her household that’s being kept under wraps.
- The police and DA want to create a spectacle for the sake of getting this law into the news and, summarily, stricken from the books.
If it was 3, I’d expect them to be advertising the case. Not having her quietly serve her time and, sadly, put up a GoFundMe for help from the community, without anyone ever saying anything or calling up the Governor for a pardon.
It seems unreasonable to believe that a Republican DA, two police officers, a judge in a Republican territory, her own lawyers, and a child protective services person would all push to have the kids protected from their parents out of shared craziness.
So, while I can’t prove it, I’d have to land on option 2. Apologies to her, if that ends up not being true.
You’ve mentioned multiple times that the authorities in this case are Republicans. What relevance is that supposed to have?
In general, I think that the general public associates (fairly or not) things like:
- Improper government intrusion into the family and how they raise kids (It Takes a Village)
- Treating kids like babies
- Treating adults like babies
- Giving everyone a trophy for participation
- And so on
As the proclivities of Democrats. Whether that’s all so universal as they would like you to think or not, it seems worth noting that two people who would, in theory, be opposed to anything along those lines both decided to vote against her.
I would certainly expect that, if this mother was poor and/or a minority, Republican cops and politicians would make it their business to harass her any way they can.
Seriously, you think Republicans respect individual rights and don’t want to interfere with people’s decisions about how to manage their families? The party which wants to imprison women for having abortions, psychologists for counseling children about gender identity, teachers for teaching American history, and anyone for smoking pot?
What the fuck is the matter with you??
Thank fucking god this is the pit, right? @Sage_rat, I suggest you take a long hard look at what the Republican Party is doing in Texas in particular, requiring CPS to perform mandatory investigations of families with trans children, mobilizing the national guard to conduct farcical border operations (with many resulting suicides attributable to low morale and botched mobilization), and its state DPS’s horrendous response to the Uvalde massacre and its aftermath.
Did you know the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton (a republican), has been under felony indictment on state charges since 2015?
The Republican party is nothing if it is not corrupt. The only thing that is mildly surprising to me here is that the accused is a white suburbanite (I mean, normally the police in Texas can be relied upon to focus their oppression on poor or working class minorities, not well-to-do white women in the suburbs–so maybe that’s why this is getting media attention?). That said, so many of the targets of the GOP’s anti-trans, anti-immigrant, anti-human rights agenda in Texas happen to be white as well (sometimes bigotry and oppression really are color blind), so maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise to me after all.
If I had to connect this to a typical GOP issue, it would be that the GOP doesn’t mind shaming women who fail to live up to whatever stereotype of a suburbanite father-knows-best kind of mom looking after the nuclear family, so maybe this woman’s conduct in some way fell short of that? That or she really is just a piece of shit and did way more than just expect her kid to walk home.
I mean, holy shit, this is the party that wants to require teenagers to appear before a judge to first prove they are mature enough to get an abortion. What the fuck kind of hole have you had your head stuck up these last sixty-odd years?
Seriously, maybe bow out of this before you make yourself look even more foolish.
I swore I remembered reading about this a year ago…!
Meh, I think that @Sage_Rat is onto something. Republicans are terrible busybodies when it comes to family life, but only in very specific ways, i.e., anything that branches out from the white middle-class heteronormative cisgender Christian nuclear family. If you’ve got that, they’re super protective of your family life under the name of “freedom.”
I don’t necessarily think that Republican sheriffs, for example, are less likely to prosecute child abuse that Democratic sheriffs; but Republican ideologues define “child abuse” as something fundamentally different from how sane people define it.
Seriously, i have to agree with @Sage_Rat as well. Republicans even in Texas do not generally accuse white middle-class surburbanite moms of child abuse on a whim. If she was a single mother, or lesbian, trans, immigrant, non-white, non-English-speaking, poor, obviously non-Christian, or otherwise a member of any other out-group, sure, but conservative Republicans are all about using state power to control out-groups, not each other and not people they’d regard as “real Americans.”
I think that it’s true that some members of the public, especially Republicans, have been fooled into thinking those are the “proclivities” of Democrats, but that’s because they are stupid, gullible, and have a high tendency towards wanting authoritarian rule, even going so far as to say that we need to trust politicians, rather than hold them accountable for their actions. They ignore the reality of Republicans intruding into the bedroom and the home regularly, and they themselves hold the infantile belief in the infallibility of their authoritarian betters. And of course Republicans don’t award a trophy for mere participation, they only reward serious fuckups.
I can see why someone who has drank that deeply of the totalitarian flavor-aid would doubt the possibility that the police could ever do any wrong, and that they would never push a criminal case against someone for something as minor as daring to question their authority.
There’s theory, in that in theory, there are stupid and gullible people who believe that Republicans would be opposed to storming into someone’s home and telling them how to live their lives. And then there’s reality, and the reality is that just because someone is a Republican doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t storm into someone’s home to tell them how to live their lives.
Now, we don’t know the details, and it’s possible that the woman’s story has some holes in it, but jumping in to fill those holes with the claim of pure wholesomeness on the part of the law enforcement is to engage in pure fantasy.
The only evidence that you have provided here is how easy it is for authoritarians to get some people to accept their rule.
Yeah, and what if she had the temerity to talk back to the cops when they showed up at her door?
In my Texas suburb?
If she was a white middle-class mom, I’d be shocked if they arrested her or even did anything more than try to placate her, unless she were screaming in their faces or attempting to assault them.
I’d like to see some (or any) other details or evidence than a single internet article on this one. Everything else on the web seems to be recreational outrage and/or news aggregator bots using the same single article.
I don’t think it matters, in the real world, what their political affiliation is. People are just geographically allocated to a political party but it doesn’t change that person’s inclinations.
But, the article is written for Reason and the target audience is Libertarians and Republicans.
It’s like when Trump was accused of sneaking into the changing rooms at Teen Miss America. It bore emphasizing that the women accusing him were Republicans.
If this article was from Huffington Post and it seemed to be making an argument like:
Then I would feel like it was worthwhile to point out that the lawyers and the child protection services folk are more likely to be Democrats and that they went along with the prosecution of the mom, so any accusation that they were targeting her because she was a teacher who supported gay rights, etc. sounds questionable.
Impressive, you have very tolerant cops. Do you live in the same general area as she does? Do you have the same socioeconomic status as her family?
And there is a difference between screaming in their faces and assaulting them. The former is something she should be allowed to do, the latter, not so much. If they arrested her for screaming in their faces for picking up her child a block away from her home and giving her a “talking to”, then they should just take it like the adults that they are supposed to be, but they probably wouldn’t, and would act like the babies they are trained to be, and arrest her as a form of temper tantrum.
I guess I am not aware of any laws against yelling at a cop in your own home. But then, you don’t need to break a law to be arrested.
So would I, but some things I’ve learned about cops is that they have no problem with lying, and they don’t like to have their authority questioned. Just go over to the “controversial encounters” thread to see this in action.
As I said, we don’t know enough to say, but to jump to the conclusion that she must be lying, and law enforcement is entirely truthful, is not appropriate, IMHO.
It’s hard to tell what is going on from news reports. I people who have had interactions with the law, that if you googled to try to find more information, you won’t find it, all the news may talk about is their initial arrest or confrontation, and online court records are intentionally kept fairly non-specific. So, lack of information about this isn’t really as damning as some are making it out to be.
Except of course, that what you point out is entirely false. CPS specifically did not want to press charges against her. Are you actually basing your conclusions on faulty information, or are you assuming faulty information based on your conclusions? Seems to be the latter.
All you have is fact free partisan snipes, and all you are doing is pointing out how pathetic the Republicans and those who follow them are.
Another article. What’s the general view of the Independent (UK)?
Rather than risk jail time, Ms Wallace told The Independent she admitted the offence and carried out a community service programme.
Is this a verification or not? Frankly the article so closely follows the Reason article that I am suspicious–and think that she did not in fact speak to the Independent.
YMMV with that, of course, but it’s generally true that I’d expect something similar for suburban Dallas as here in suburban Houston.
Anecdotes aren’t particularly good data but in the big cities, I’ve witnessed cops let white suburban housewives go (actually, they’d ask if they were ok or if something was wrong) after accidentally running red lights or stop signs while grilling brown/black drivers who weren’t committing any moving violations.
This family, though, is in Waco, which is much smaller. We’re a bit larger and more diverse, so the cops in Waco and environs may come down harder on everybody in general.
“Report” - singular. All the others I’ve seen so far appear to be aggregator bots basically plagiarizing the one Reason article.
Right now, I’m not going to favor the mom or the cops. There’s really no sufficient information either way and the article seems to be internet pablum designed to generate recreational outrage, at which it clearly is doing a spectacular job.
Fair, but like I said, often, there really isn’t a whole lot of news about this sort of thing. I know people who get arrested (and often for valid reasons(or at least valid in that they broke a law, not always valid in that the law the broke should exist)), and if I looked them up in the news, I wouldn’t see anything at all.
I’m not either, there really isn’t enough information. I only found myself drawn to participate in this thread to push back against those who automatically favor the cops.